The Company Scalia Kept

Scalia travelled to Texas with C. Allen Foster, a Washington lawyer known for representing right-leaning clients.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty

Justice Antonin Scalia died last month while on a hunting trip in Texas. He was participating in an outing organized by the International Order of St. Hubertus, a members-only hunting society that dates to the seventeenth century. The owner of the Cibolo Creek Ranch, the thirty-thousand-acre resort where the hunt took place, is John Poindexter, who told the Washington Post that he covered room and board for his thirty-five guests, including Scalia. (They reportedly paid for their own travel.) Because Poindexter runs an industrial company that had a case before the Supreme Court last year (the Justices declined to hear it), some have raised questions about the propriety of Scalia’s visit.

I see nothing wrong with Scalia’s attendance at the event. Supreme Court Justices are allowed to accept travel and accommodations from individuals and organizations as long as they disclose any reimbursements greater than three hundred and thirty-five dollars. All of the Justices make these kinds of trips, usually to law schools and Bar Associations, and it’s good that they do. Appearances before law students or legal groups help demystify the Supreme Court, and the law should encourage this kind of outreach, not discourage it. Unlike other federal judges, the Justices are not formally bound by federal ethics rules, an exemption that some in Congress have tried to change in recent years. But the Justices have generally acted in accord with the federal guidelines, which prohibit any kind of gifts from individuals with pending cases. I’ve rarely found reason to complain about the ethics (as opposed to the decisions) of the Justices. Likewise in Scalia’s case. If a friend of Scalia wanted to host the Justice for a hunting trip, that also seems unproblematic to me. Justices are allowed to have friends, and they’re allowed to enjoy the hospitality of those friends.

Still, the visits—and the friends—can be revealing. Scalia travelled to the Texas hunting trip on a private plane with a friend named C. Allen Foster, a seventy-four-year-old lawyer in D.C. Foster has a varied law practice, specializing in the law of construction, but also representing several right-leaning clients. He represented the Republican Party in redistricting cases and the company formerly known as Blackwater in a case arising out of the death of four of its contractors during the American occupation of Iraq. (Foster did not reply to an e-mail or return a phone call.)

Foster is a hunting enthusiast, as was Justice Scalia. The lawyer described his passion a couple of years ago in an autobiographical portrait for the fiftieth reunion of the Princeton Class of 1963. Like many such essays, Foster’s begins in a jocular vein—“You’re only as old as your current wife,” he writes. But then he goes on to say that while he spent his professional career practicing law, “I’ve also been pursuing my passion—killing things. I’m sure many of you have become mamby-pamby girly men and think that killing things is oh, so redneck and lower class. Well, you’ll be delighted to know that I generally go killing things with Continental royalty and English nobility, and we look down on the rednecks just like you do.” (According to the Web site of the Order of St. Hubertus, the current grand master is His Imperial Highness Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen, the archduke of Austria.)

Foster went on, “I am pleased to report that I’ve killed lots of elephants, lions, buffalo, leopards, kudu, deer and the last legally shot black rhinoceros, together with more than 150,000 birds of various species. When the last duck comes flying over with a sign around his neck ‘I am the last duck,’ I will shoot it.” Concluding with a political observation, Foster writes, “It also won’t surprise you that I still rail against liberals, the academic kleptocracy, Washington bureaucrats and feminazis.”

In the days since Scalia’s death, his long friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, his ideological opposite on the Supreme Court, has been widely noted. But when it came to a hunting buddy, at least, it seems as though Scalia preferred someone whose politics were about as far from Justice Ginsburg’s as they could be.